Pleasure Activism
Pleasure can be a form of activism, depending on who you are, where you live, who you love, your race and gender.
There are a lot of remarkable people out there who do powerful work for women’s pleasure and sexual wellness, especially for those who are marginalized in our society.
Two of those people are Adrienne Marie Brown and Audre Lord.
Read and be inspired! ❤️
Excerpts from Brown’s “Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good” (2019)
“I love the particular pleasures of being a woman. I love being of women who transform the brutal conditions we survive, who are upending rape culture, knowing we are inferior to no one, weaving our suffering into a fierce togetherness, into homes, chosen families, radical sisterhood and tomorrows.”
“We need radical honesty—learning to speak from our root systems about how we feel and what we want. Speak our needs and listen to others’ needs. To say, “I need to hear that you miss me.” “When you’re high all the time it’s hard for me to feel your presence.” “I lied.” “The way you talked to that man made me feel unseen.” “Your jealousy makes me feel like an object and not a partner.” The result of this kind of speech is that our lives begin to align with our longings, and our lives become a building block for authentic community and ultimately a society that is built around true need and real people, not fake news and bullshit norms.”
Excerpt from Lord’s “The Erotic as Power” (1978)
“The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane... In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those serious sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives. We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused and devalued within western society…
On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence. It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power…
As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world...But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough...When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the life- force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now realizing in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”
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Feel free to share any thoughts or reflections from reading this with me by sending me an email.
